Digital Athena
  • Blog
  • Essays and Book Reviews
  • Contact Us
  • About Digital Athena
  • Index of Essays and Reviews

Lost in the Information

12/8/2011

0 Comments

 
Towards the end of James Gleick's 400+ page book, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, Gleick sums up our current dilemma as we climb what he calls "the exponential ladder of information” as follows:
"As the train hurtled onward," Gleick writes, "its passengers sometimes felt the pace foreshortening their sense of their own history. Moore's law had looked simple on paper, but its consequences left people struggling to find metaphors with which to understand their experience." (395) A little further on he himself struggles with the experience of the Internet: "The network has a structure, and that structure stands upon a paradox. Everything is close, and everything is far, at the same time. This is why cyberspace can feel not just crowded but lonely. You can drop a stone in a well and never hear a splash." (425)

Not everyone agrees with Gleick that the Internet is ordered. Steven Johnson, writing of order in Emergence: The  Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, points out: “The portals and the search engines exist in the first place because the Web is a tremendously disorganized space, a system where the disorder grows right alongside the overall volume." It is, he concludes, a phenomenon incapable of generating its own structure. The sheer barbarity and utter senselessness of the Internet as a whole may well contribute, I believe, to our fundamental alienation from it. Taken as a whole, it is far too chaotic an experience to comprehend.

That fundamental loneliness, that emptiness and confusion, Gleick  himself may have best expressed in the metaphor of the cloud—the evanescent, impalpable, invisible network that "looms over us . .  not quite tangible but awfully real; amorphous, spectral hovering nearby yet not situated in any one place." (395-6)

And that is the nature of the digital experience: it eludes us even as it overwhelms us. In the end, we are alone in the endless sea of countless nodes, myriad connections, and, oh yes, the information.

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    December 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009

    Categories

    All
    AI
    Computer Models
    Convergence
    Digital Software
    Division Of Labor
    E Readers
    Facebook
    Financial Markets
    Google
    Innovation Business Cycle
    Internet
    Knowledge
    Learning
    Media Use
    Myths
    Powerpoint
    Robots
    Screen Life
    Screen Life
    Search
    Social Networking
    Targeted Marketing
    Technology And Jobs
    The Nature Of The Digital
    The Nature Of The Digital
    Video Games
    Web 2.0
    Wikis
    Youth

    Cynthia's Blog Plan

    I'll aim to post here a few times a month, based on current events and my ongoing research.